Science/Technology

In “The Martian,” Matt Damon stars as astronaut Mark Watney, who gets stranded alone on the red planet. The story is based on a book by the same name, in which Watney is separated from his crew and left alone on Mars when a dust storm forces them to evacuate early.

“This movie could stand on its own, even under Martian gravity,” says Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut and chemical engineer who has spent time aboard the International Space Station.

“It drives like a regular car, operates like a regular car. You can refuel in three to five minutes and, you know, do 350 miles on a trip,” says Craig Scott, Toyota’s national manager for advanced technologies in the US.

Scott is overseeing the US release of the Mirai, Toyota's hydrogen fuel cell car.

“We're really excited,” Scott says. “This will be the first time for US consumers to get a chance to actually own a real live fuel cell electric vehicle.”

Sneakers are a relatively recent innovation that owe their existence, according to Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum, to the rubber tree.

“Sneakers right from the beginning were part of the technological revolution that was happening in the 19th century. They were absolutely one of the newest forms of footwear ever created,” Semmelhack says. “The sneaker was reliant on rubber.”

Americans dumped 262 million tonnes of municipal trash into landfills in 2012, according to a new study published recently in Nature Climate Change. That's more than double the EPA estimate for that same year.

Celebrated mystery writer Agatha Christie authored more than 80 detective books. In many, the plot features characters killed by poisoning — with ingredients as diverse as digitalis (foxglove), strychnine and thallium.

In August of this year, Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the toxoplasmosis treatment Daraprim. They quickly hiked the price of the drug by more than 5,000 percent, from $13.50 per pill to $750 a pill, causing a public outcry.

“Actually, there isn't any illegal, anti-trust reason why this company can't do this. Assuming that they receive their monopoly in a legal fashion ... it is within the company's rights, if they have a natural monopoly, to charge whatever they want for their product,” says Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Right after the Big Bang, giant showers of neutrinos were spewed across the universe. These subatomic particles, produced by the decay of radioactive elements, are the focus of intense research by scientists in laboratories around the world. They are hoping these phantoms of physics could unlock mysteries about dark matter and about how the universe was formed.

NASA's announcement that they have evidence of still-existing liquid water on Mars raised eyebrows Monday, as well as renewed hopes that life might still be possible on the Red Planet. A local expert says the best chance of finding it there is by digging deeper.

There are many things bikers have to worry about while out on the road: construction, potholes, adverse weather, unaware drivers and, of course, as one inner city cyclist pointed out, black snot.

“It was just so much construction that, on top of the pollution of the cars and the construction pollution, I just couldn't take it anymore. I would come home and I would have like black snot. It was just nasty,” says Mirna Gatika, a cyclist who rides her bicycle daily from Queens to the Bronx and back over the Triborough Bridge.

“This is going to blow people's minds,” promises Dean Regas, an astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory and co-host of the PBS program, Star Gazers.

And it did. Take a look at the lunar eclipse Sunday night.

Sunday evening, there was four major moon events to watch in the night sky. There was a total lunar eclipse, the closest full moon of the year, the harvest moon and the completion of the tetrad, the fourth in a series of four lunar eclipses back to back.

A new study finds that the text of children's books contains substantially more unique words than ordinary parent-child conversation, which may help explain why reading to children is so important to their development.

“We've known for a while that there are a lot of benefits to reading to kids, in terms of vocabulary and language development and later literacy. The real question is, why,” says Jessica Montag, an assistant research psychologist at University of California Riverside, and author of the new study in Psychological Science.

In a new book, science writer Steve Silberman chronicles the mostly unknown history of how the diagnosis and treatment of autism was stymied by the Nazi invasion of Austria and subsequently hijacked by an American clinician with a limited understanding of the disorder.

Scientists have long wondered what happens to information that enters black holes. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking thinks he has the answer.

Information entering a black hole may not be truly lost, he suggests. Instead, that information could still exist in a sort of hologram on the black hole’s event horizon. But this doesn’t mean you should design your next information-storage service around the use of black holes. “For all practical purposes, the information is lost,” Hawking says. That is, it exists “in a chaotic and useless form.”

Lighting has come a long way since Tom Edison lit his first incandescent bulb in the 1880s. LED bulbs are popping up everywhere, on planes, car headlights, in your phone. When you buy a new light bulb now, chances are it's going to be an LED.

At the heart of every LED is not a little wire. If you open up an LED, there's a semiconductor in there, and engineers are exploring more ways to use that semiconductor — everything from wireless data streaming to secure communication systems and in-flight networking.

Rooftop solar power is booming. And as more and more consumers discover that prices for solar power are falling, they're slapping panels on their roofs and buying less energy from the power companies.

Are we really seeing a revolution in rooftop solar? “Yes,” says David Roberts, a staff writer at Vox.com.

“I think by any measure, the word revolution applies at this point,” Roberts says. “Just for perspective, the residential solar industry grew 76 percent in the last year in the US. ... It's exciting because I think we're right at the very, very beginning of it.”

The Baltimore orioles and yellow warblers are missing from the trees and bushes near the office of Emma Greig, a project leader for Project Feeder Watch at Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithica, New York.

“What I've noticed most in the past couple of weeks as I've walked into the office is actually a lack of [bird] songs,” Greig says. “It means that fall is here, or fall is on its way and winter is coming.”

A recent investigation by The New York Times revealed the ways Amazon measures and monitors employees at its headquarters, crunching data to sort out who is most efficient and deserving of promotion — and who isn't. But this gamification of the workplace is far from new.

UPS drivers, truckers, authors and retail clerks are also subjected to the tracking power of technology — and the outcomes aren't always effective or ethical.

“The vagina is cleaner than your mouth,” declared Sharon Hillier, addressing a group of journalists at the HIV Research for Prevention conference in Cape Town last fall. The audience squirmed, gasped and giggled.

The professor of obstetrics-gynecology and reproductive services at the University of Pittsburgh is known for her unabashed statements: She introduces herself as a vaginal ecologist and calls the vagina a “beautiful ecosystem.”

The United States has a basic and intuitive policy when it comes to forest fires: put them out, and put them out as quickly as possible.

This policy of fire suppression is one the US has followed for over a century. Some scientists, however, are beginning to question this strategy. There is a growing consensus of researchers who believe suppressing forest fires might actually be causing more severe fires, and worsening climate change long-term.

“I like other marine animals, but octopuses — they’re aliens on our planet. They're the closest thing we're going to get to that.”

So says Richard Ross, a senior biologist at the Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences. “They have eight arms, they have suckers all over the place, they have great eyesight, they can make ink, they can swim, they have jet propulsion…The more we learn, the more interesting they become,” Ross says.

Now, Ross has discovered, in the larger Pacific striped octopus, some new and unexpected practices.

Contractors working for the EPA caused the blowout at the Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado. That released a plume of toxic orange-yellow sludge that eventually reached as far as Utah and New Mexico.